LCLI: The Stories of Flannery O’Connor

By YTI Staff

February-March 2018 Inscribed

Flannery O’Connor is known and beloved for her sparely narrated stories that frequently become violent and interpretively difficult at their climactic moments. Dr. Rachel Toombs, professor of theology and Old Testament, will examine O’Connor’s writing in “The Stories of Flannery O’Connor: Narrating the Terrifying Reality of Grace,” YTI’s spring Local Community Learning Initiative offering.

Dr. Toombs will explore the impact of O’Connor’s violent narrations of the possibility of grace in the lives of her central characters and on her readers. O’Connor once noted that “Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.” The lecture will explore how absence and presence reveal, without making cheap or flippant, the possibility of rendering grace in the world.